The Point of Illustration

This week the Guardian reported that a new illustrated version of Rowling’s Harry Potter books will be published this autumn.  It was welcome news:  I wish more stories and novels, particularly first editions were illustrated.  It also seems to me there never was a time when audiences were more receptive to it, unless it was the late 19^th century.

That hasn’t always been the case.   I remember when serious, literary fiction, whatever that is, was almost never illustrated.  John Gardner, the author of Grendel, commissioned illustrations for his book of stories and the idea had become sufficiently novel to draw media attention to his book for that reason alone.

Of course that set me to remembering lazy summer afternoons looking through the illustrated books in my grandmother’s little library when I was just learning to read.  One was “The Thrall of Leif the Lucky, A Tale of Viking Days” illustrated by Troy and Margaret West Kinney.  The bright images seemed a little stiff even to my four year-old eyes but they caught my imagination.  And a few years later I struggled through the novel and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Then there was an immense edition of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” illustrated by Gustave Doré.  I always was particularly fond of his image of Satan accompanying his great self-revelatory lines,

“Me miserable! Which way shall I fly

Infinite wrath and infinite despair?

Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;

And in the lowest deep a lower deep,

Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,

To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”

As a side note, notice that Milton uses the mathematical notion of recursion to define hell, which is wicked cool.  I’ve always wondered if this was the first appearance of the concept in science or literature.  And, I wonder if it’s possible to create a credible vision of heaven or hell without it.  I also still ponder why biblical villains always get to wear the best looking armor?

Pride of place for me was “A Boy’s King Arthur,” illustrated by the great N. C. Wyeth.  When we were living in Massachusetts, the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland Maine held a large exhibition of N. C. Wyeth’s illustrations and paintings and I recall the long drive, lunch and the museum that autumn with particular fondness.  Because of the vast memories it evoked and the immediacy of seeing the original art first hand I felt I was walking abroad “in a shower of all my days,” to use Dylan Thomas’ great birthday words.  My grandmother had several  editions of Mallory, one in particular that preserved the original late medieval spellings.  It had an illustration of the wounded and lifeless Arthur in bloody mail and white surcoat in the arms of a summery-tressed Guinevere that I loved and have never been able to find again.

Now, so many years later, I’ve decided those illustrations did me good service.  They educated my imagination, implicitly encouraging invention, elaboration and careful attention to detail.  Even now I believe that imagination works a little like a muscle and can be strengthened by exercise and practice, which is what great illustrations can help us to do.  It’s a “high” art if there ever was one.

Much, much later I came across Bauer’s illustrations of “Our Fathers’ Godsaga” by Viktor Rydberg and they were so good I imagined I’d seen them in my grandmother’s library, although I know I didn’t.